Tag: Atlantic Magazine

just a few photos of many beautiful libraries in Massachusetts (Boston, Gloucester, Quincy, Beverly, Middleton)

As do towns! The proposed new building (Dore & Whittier/Matt Oudens) related to the Sawyer Free Library is landing at the tail end of the visioning trend called out in this Atlantic article by Alia Wong:

“College Students Just Want Normal Libraries: Schools have been on a mission to reinvent campus libraries—even though students just want the basics.”

“Yet much of the glitz may be just that—glitz. Survey data and experts suggest that students generally appreciate libraries most for their simple, traditional offerings: a quiet place to study or collaborate on a group project, the ability to print research papers, and access to books.”

“So-called digital natives still crave opportunities to use libraries as libraries, and many actively seek out physical texts—92 percent of the college students surveyed in a 2015 study, for example, said they preferred paper books to electronic versions. (Plus, a growing body of evidence shows that physical books and papers are more conducive to learning than digital formats are.) The dean of learning and technology resources at one of the six campuses of Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) recently told me about a student he had met: Upon learning that her campus library had only the e-book version of a text she needed to read, the woman opted to make the trek to another campus a nearly half-hour commute away that had the hard copy. A 2016 survey of students at Webster University in Washington, D.C., also illustrates limited use of digital resources, finding that just 18 percent of students accessed e-books “frequently” or “very frequently,” compared with 42 percent who never used them.

“Duke University’s 2016 survey of its students drew similar conclusions, finding that book delivery was one of the most important services to students; fancy library services such as instant messaging or data-visualization help fell much lower on students’ priority lists. A separate, years-long project on community-college students by the NOVA dean and a team of researchers found that respondents “most often view the library as the service provider they would likely go to” for an array of bread-and-butter needs, such as help gathering research for a paper, registering for classes, or applying for financial aid. Demand for access to devices such as 3-D printers and virtual-reality headsets was relatively low; respondents tended to highlight the need for reliable Wi-Fi instead.

“Many college libraries are reinventing themselves, but perhaps they’re trying to fix an institution that isn’t, in fact, broken…”

“Most people who follow food are aware that scientists and tech companies are trying to grow meat in labs. When they’ll see it and what it will look and taste like—those are …”

“…They are both environmentalists and either vegan or vegetarian, and they got to talking about overfishing and the antibiotic resistance, heavy-metal content, and ocean-pollution hazards of aquaculture. Not to mention the slave labor for Thai shrimp production. So there was a market opportunity. One night at a bar they wrote a plan on the back of a napkin for how they would experiment with fish cells—which cells, which growth media—and mapped out experiments to make scalable culturing possible…”

fake lobster at Zabar’s:

“When it comes to recreating fish fillets, Finless Foods has a secret ally available that meat simulators haven’t had the advantage of. The extremely advanced surimi industry in Japan pulverizes neutral-flavored whitefish flesh, usually Alaskan pollock, mixes it with salt, sugar, and MSG, and extrudes the resulting meal into imitation shrimp, crab, and lobster so convincing that, to take one notorious example, generations of Upper West Siders can take it for lobster in Zabar’s “lobster salad.” Wyrwas and Selden say they will use their regenerative-cell technology to make the fish base and then use the sophisticated production processes of surimi to make tasty, marketable simulacra.”

Our Podcast On Stitcher

GloucesterCast 306 Taped 11/11/18

Free GMG Gloucester Sticker

As long as supplies last if any GMG folks want a bumper sticker but can't drop down the dock, just send a self addressed and stamped envelope longer then 7 and a half inches and I'll drop one in the mail for you.

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